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Haydenville Church Tower Clock

Take a tour of the beautiful E. Howard tower clock in the Haydenville Congregational Church. Human powered! 19th century engineering at its finest, still alive & kicking!

Click the picture above to start the tour. If the Info sidebar isn't shown when the picture opens, click the picture caption to display it. There's a lot of explanatory text in the sidebars.

Collin Black, the father of Penelope Black, who is the current clock minder/winder, made a video illustrating the weekly winding. Watch it here: Winding the Tower Clock.

Mergansers 2026

A bit later than usual, but Merganser mommas are back on the river with ducklings in tow. Click the picture above for the ongoing collection of ducklings growing up.

Comet PanSTARRS (C/2025 R3)

We had nothing but cloudy mornings as this year's Comet PanSTARRS brightened in its sunward dive. Finally, on April 18, one day before the comet's closest approach to the sun, the clouds broke and I headed up to Valley View Farm to see if I could get pictures of it. I had a hard time finding the sucker, and the sky was already getting bright by the time I started shooting pictures. Eight-second exposures! — that was as long as I could use with the approaching dawn. But I got 43 of these before I gave up, and image stacking was able to work magic, bringing out details that were completely invisible in the individual frames (let alone to the eye). No color to the comet in this picture due to it being a monumental signal-to-noise challenge. Click the picture above to see the full frame.

The next morning was cloudy; the morning after that was clear, but by then the comet's head would have been buried in bright daylight. Glad I got out on the 18th. After the comet rounds the sun it will be visible in evening skies, but only to observers in the Southern hemisphere.

Comet Lemmon

Comet Lemmon (C/2025 A6) is visible in the skies now and for the next week or so. With binoculars, sweep around close to the horizon in the west at about 7 PM DST (or 6 PM after Nov. 1). Look for a fuzzy star with a faint wisp of a tail pointing upward. Only the white dust tail is visible to the eye, but time exposures reveal a long blue ion tail. Click the picture above for more photos.

If you steady your binoculars and gaze at the comet for a while, you'll notice something kind of eerie: many of the stars in the field of view are moving! These are satellites, lots of them part of Starlink, and the sheer number of them is quite astonishing. With a quick glance they look like fixed stars, but on patient inspection it looks like the heavens have come unglued and the stars turned into a stately slow swarm of bees. Or Tholian spacecraft tracing invisible lines of tomorrow's Kessler web...

Great Blue Heron

I spotted a Great Blue Heron flying past my apartment yesterday, coming in low for a landing. Grabbed the camera and found him perched on a rock in the river behind my neighbor's house. I took some pictures of him standing there and hunting for fishes, and then I waited, hoping to get some shots of him taking off. This turned into a standing competition, because he seemed to be quite content basking in the sun where he was. More than an hour later he finally took off, heading upriver. Click the image above for lots more pictures.

A magnificent creature, though I can see how terrifying he would be if you were a fish or a frog. (Zoom in on the head shot above here.)

Mergansers 2025

They're back! I first spotted a momma Merganser with 8 — no, 9 ducklings above the Brassworks dam on May 27. The following week a whole lotta rain turned the river into a swift torrent, and I wondered how the Mergansers were faring. A few days later, I spotted a mom with just 5 youngsters. Is that all that's left of the 9?? Nah, the river is surprisingly safe for youngsters, even in high water or when they get temporarily separated from the family. Later spottings showed that there are two families on the river this year, one with (as it turns out) 10 youngsters and another with 5. Click the picture above for more pictures of the ducklings growing up.